Andre Liem has posted five simple tips (part one of a two-part series) on ways to optimize your PHP applications.

After experiencing some issues with an application running the Zend Framework, I realized there were a lot of things I was not doing to optimize my application. There are simple and more complex actions you can take to speed up your application. Since time is precious, and developers with an expertise on optimization are not always available, I've split this post into two sections (simple and more advanced). This post focuses on the simple part.

His simpler suggestions include using the YSlow extension in Firefox, minification of Javascript and CSS, merging CSS/JS requests, using gzip and avoiding CSS background images.

Including Javascript files into your application is simple, but for each, a HTTP call has to be made back to the server and its contents pulled down. Ed Eliot decided he wanted to compress things a bit more so he created this script to push them all into one file dynamically.

I hate maintaining this stuff manually so I've written a PHP script which takes care of merging files on the fly whilst also versioning the merged file automatically as the various component files change.

He gives an example of this simple script - defining which files to compress, defining the directory to pull them from, and using mod_rewrite to handle the Javascript file requests.